adapted from The Wisdom to Know the Difference

There are certainly many paths to recovery. But you’ll only take one. What’s the best choice for you? We don’t know. And you can never really know. You only get to live life once. However you live it, you won’t know how it would have gone had you lived it differently. Time runs in one direction. Scientific studies often tell us what happened on average to the people who got this or that treatment. We’ll cite some statistics in The Wisdom to Know the Difference. But at the end of the day you won’t have something happen to you on average. Something very particular will happen to you. The best measure—and we’ll emphasize this over and over again—is how your path to recovery is working in your own life. We’ll hold onto this practical theme throughout.

The substance of The Wisdom to Know the Difference is grounded in a model of psychotherapy called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT from here on, which should be pronounced as a word rather than separate letters.) ACT is an application of a discipline in psychology called behavior analysis. Unless you have an interest in the study of psychology, the only thing we want you to take away from this fact is that we’re concerned here with your behavior, with what you do, far more than we are with what you think or who you “are” in some abstract sense. Rather than explain too much about how ACT works as a model of psychotherapy, we’d rather keep writing to you about the issue of addiction and recovery and let the details of the approach come out in the process, in a commonsense, storytelling way rather than a deliberately professional or scholarly- seeming way. We will offer that the principles of ACT are being evaluated on an ongoing basis in research facilities all over the world, and that, from its earliest days, ACT has been applied to substance-abuse issues with good results. While what follows isn’t science, it is of science.

excerpt from The Wisdom to Know the Difference: An Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Workbook

a personal story

You’re not alone. I know the depths to which addiction can take a person, and I know something about recovery. I know it personally, and I know it as a scientist, therapist, and researcher. Woven into this book will be sensibilities science has to offer to the recovering person, but also some small bits and pieces of my own path in recovery and, finally, stories I’ve heard along the way.

The recovery process has been slow at times, even slower than baby steps. The best I’ve done some days was to sit on my hands. I’ve learned to appreciate even those days spent sitting on my hands. If I’m sitting on my hands, it’s very hard to make much mess to clean up later.

I started down this road something like twenty-five years ago. There was a time, in the winter of 1985, when I would be up in the night, lying on the bathroom floor, heartsick, alone, the house quiet all around me. Lying on that floor, between bouts of retching, I found myself in a dreadful spot—impossibly trapped between an absolute inability to drink anymore and an absolute inability to stop. Lying on that floor, I could feel the cool of the linoleum on my cheek and it was good. There in the bathroom, in the middle of the night, tortured, I found a moment’s rest, my cheek pressed to the cool floor. My whole world was reduced to six square inches of cool linoleum. I could not leave that room without the terrors welling up around me. Even trying to rise from the floor filled me with awareness of all that I had done and regretted—and not done, and regretted more.

It was a starting point. From there, people began to teach me about acceptance and about holding my story in the world a little more gently, about letting go of limitations and opening up to possibility. By inches, I made my way up off the floor and out of that bathroom. I became engaged in the world in new ways. When I look where acceptance, openness, and engagement have taken me over the years, I have to pinch myself. I’ve fallen in love with people all over the world. I’ve become intimate with people and places and ideas that I could not have imagined. I’ve found souls all along the way who saw possibilities in me that I could not see in myself. And I’ve in turn had the privilege of seeing in others strength and beauty and possibility that they could not see.

by Susan Pease Gadoua, LCSW is the author of Stronger Day by Day

If you love an alcoholic or addict, you know how terrible the disease of addiction can be and you are indirectly impacted. If you are married to an addict or alcoholic, not only do you suffer from watching the person you love go down the tubes, you are directly affected.

You have to deal with the person you love behaving irrationally, getting sick, perhaps lying, cheating or any other number of unacceptable behaviors and, on top of that, you are legally bound to this person. That means that you bear the brunt and are on the hook for any damage they may cause.

Tragically, I have seen dozens of relationships deteriorate or completely dissolve due to addiction in one spouse or the other. Given that the prevalence of addiction is staggering, this comes as no surprise. Here are some of the estimates of numbers on only a handful of types of addictions:

by blogger Suzanne B. Phillips, Psy.D., co-author of Healing Together

Addictive relating, as evidenced by the proliferation of books on the subject, is all too common, painful and suffered by both men and women. In my work with people trapped in addictive relationships, it becomes clear that their efforts to "desperately keep someone" has much more to do with needing the other at any cost than about sharing a loving relationship.

Excerpt from The Anorexia Workbook

Mental Volleyball

At this point, you may be wondering if this is about anorexia or sports. Don’t worry—volleyball does relate to anorexia. How? Well, the strategy of volleyball is a great way to describe how you are responding to thoughts about yourself. Imagine that a volley ball match is going on inside your mind. Instead of volleying a ball back and forth, the teams inside your head are volleying thoughts about you.

Excerpt from The Family Recovery Guide

The seeds of healthy growth are sown in the transition stage; in early recovery, they begin to take root. Here, the foundation for the individual identity is set in place, bringing new found stability. Early recovery can be a time of unparalleled personal change, hope, and excitement; it can also be a time of trauma, especially at home, where the family members are still functioning with out a strong, healthy family system. Even as growth begins, tensions and set backs are to be expected. During early recovery, the alcoholic and co-alcoholic are still extremely dependent on their relationships with their recovery programs. Their main focus at this time is education about alcohol ism and the process of recovery in general, and on the specific ways in which each particular individual has experienced these realities. To facilitate this education, they learn recovery language, which helps them organize their past experiences and under stand their ongoing thoughts and feelings. By internalizing this new language and the abstinent behaviors that were set in place during transition, they begin to solidify their new alcoholic or co-alcoholic identities. The healthy behavior they practiced in transition starts to become less conscious and more automatic as their impulses to drink or take care of the drinker finally begin to decrease.